Nigeria: 22 Christians killed in Boko Haram attack

Islamist militants have killed 74 people in two separate raids carried out on 2 villages

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Pubblicato il
28/01/2014

Ultima modifica il 28/01/2014 alle ore 17:30

vatican insider staff

Boko Haram’s harrowing extermination spree continues in north-eastern Nigeria: Islamist militants carried out two separate raids on two villages on Sunday killing at least 74 people. They used bombs and ordnance weapons to attack a church packed with faithful attending Sunday mass, killing 22 Christians. They also attacked a marketplace in another village, killing 52 people and razing the entire residential area to the ground, eye witnesses say.

So far Boko Haram is the only group being blamed for the Sunday massacres. The news reached the media on Monday, shocking a country which should in theory be used to violence and massacres under President Goodluck Jonathan’s leadership. In almost five years of ongoing military conflict, he has been unable to contain the violence of Islamist radicals (at least 1,200 have died since 2009) in the vast, remote, densely populated and predominantly Muslim regions of the north and especially in the states where Boko Haram’s jihadist strongholds are. Here, Boko Haram is striking out against the Christian minority and at the same time against the federal security forces.

The north-eastern states of Adamawa and Borno, the scenes of yesterday’s massacres, are in the eye of the storm. In Adamawa, the terrorists targeted the Catholic Church of Waga Chakawa, just a few kilometres from the Borno border. They arrived in jeeps and pick-up trucks and made a beeline for the church, where they began a wild shooting spree, lobbing grenades at the crowd of faithful. A number of the village’s inhabitants were kept hostage throughout the attack, which witnesses say lasted around 4 hours. The gunmen also set off explosives in buildings and huts. The bodies of the 22 people that died have already been buried. Others were wounded but the exact figure is unknown.

Survivors say the village of Kawuri in Borno was completely wiped out. The terrorists arrived here with reinforcements (about 50 of them were counted aboard vehicles with heavy machine guns), unleashing their violence against people who had come from various parts of the region to visit the Sunday market. To prevent people from fleeing immediately, they arrived armed but pretended they had just come to buy some things from the market. The carnage began when Boko Haram’s militants unexpectedly opened fire in the midst of the crowds. “They planted home-made bombs in a number of strategic places in the village, before attacking the population,” Isa Ibrahim, one of the lucky ones who escaped the massacre, told AFP. Other witnesses told the media that the terrorists shot at anyone who tried to escape the buildings that had been set ablaze.

Survivors counted at least 52 dead but the death toll will probably rise given the dozens of individuals wounded, some of them in critical conditions. “Not one house was left standing,” Ari Kolomi, another Kawuri survivor said. He managed to reach Borno’s capital, Maiduguri after a 70 kilometre walk. “There were more than 50 militiamen and they used explosives and ordnance weapons,” said Kolomi, who still does not know how many of his family members made it through alive.